Occasional Papers eBook

on in the early morning hours in Carlton House Terrace.
All this time the foundations were being laid and the
materials gathered for books of wider scope and more
permanent aim, too vast for him to accomplish even
in his later years of leisure. It is an original
and instructive picture; for though we boast statesmen
who still carry on the great traditions of scholarship,
and give room in their minds for the deeper and more
solemn problems of religion and philosophy, they are
not supposed to be able to carry on simultaneously
their public business and their classical or scientific
studies, and at any rate they do not attack the latter
with the devouring zeal with which Bunsen taxed the
efforts of hard-driven secretaries and readers to keep
pace with his inexhaustible demands for more and more
of the most abstruse materials of knowledge.

The end of his London diplomatic career was, like
the end of his Roman one, clouded with something like
disgrace; and, like the Roman one, is left here unexplained.
But it was for his happiness, probably, that his residence
in England came to a close. He had found the poetry
of his early notions about England, political and
theological at least, gradually changing into prose.
He found less and less to like, in what at first most
attracted him, in the English Church; he and it, besides
knowing one another better, were also changing.
He probably increased his sympathies for England,
and returned in a measure to his old kindness for
it, by looking at it only from a distance. The
labour of his later days, as vast and indefatigable
as that of his earlier days, was devoted to his great
work, which was, as it were, to popularise the Bible
and revive interest in it by a change in the method
of presenting it and commenting on it. To the
last the Bible was the central point of his philosophical
as well as his religious thoughts, as it had been in
his first beginnings as a student at Gottingen and
Rome. After a life of many trials, but of unusual
prosperity and enjoyment, he died in the end of 1860.
The account of his last days is a very touching one.

We do not pretend to think Bunsen the great and consummate
man that, naturally enough, he appears to his friends.
We doubt whether he can be classed as a man in the
first rank at all. We doubt whether he fully
understood his age, and yet it is certain that he was
confident and positive that he did understand it better
than most men; and an undue confidence of this kind
implies considerable defects both of intellect and
character. He wanted the patient, cautious, judicial
self-distrust which his studies eminently demanded,
and of which he might have seen some examples in England.
No one can read these volumes without seeing the disproportionate
power which first impressions had with him; he was
always ready to say that something, which had just
happened or come before him, was the greatest or the
most complete thing of its kind. Wonderfully
active, wonderfully quick and receptive, full of imagination